Afghani marriage trends...

[General Brock]

From the The Daily Times of Pakistan:

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Temporary marriage catches on in Afghanistan

By Shoib Najafizada

In a country where most marriages are for life and all divorces are a scandal, the idea of the contract or temporary marriage is beginning to catch on

TWENTY-NINE-year-old mechanic Payenda Mohammad was married last month in a simple ceremony in this northern Afghanistan town, but the marriage only lasted four hours, which was exactly what he wanted.

“Nobody would give me their daughters to marry because I didn’t have family or money,” says Payenda, who ended up in Iran after his parents and a sister were killed in a bombing raid about 15 years ago.

“I started doing short marriages in Iran,” he says. “When I came back to Mazar-i-Sharif, I continued,” he says. He’s now been married 20 times.

In a country where most marriages are for life and all divorces are a scandal, the idea of the contract or temporary marriage is beginning to catch on.

Afghanistan’s majority Sunni Muslims ban the marriages, known as fegha in the main Dari language, but the Shias accept them and some people here, like Payenda, got the idea from Iran.

Such marriages were rare in Afghanistan before the Sunni-dominated Taliban regime was overthrown in late 2001, ending 25 years of war.

But with the return of many of the nearly two million Afghans who fled to Shia Iran during the conflict, contract marriages are gaining popularity - although they are still unusual.

The process is simple. To get married, a couple takes an oath in front of a mullah that makes them man and wife for a stipulated period of time - from a few hours to a few years.

Afterwards they can choose to marry each other again or move on.

Shia clerics defend the practice as something that benefits both the men and women.

“For a man it means he doesn’t have to think about women or sex. For a woman, it means she has a husband to feed and take care of her and her children,” said Sayed Barat Ali Razawi, a Shia mullah in Mazar-i-Sharif.

He says the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) himself gave permission for soldiers to have short marriages while they were away from home, and for women to marry temporarily if their real husbands had died.

Sunni Muslims say this is wrong.

“In my opinion contract marriage is just for sex,” says Mullah Azizullah Mofley, a Sunni cleric, insisting the prophet (PBUH) had later outlawed the practice.

Young people “abuse contract marriages just for sex by marrying for just one or two hours”, he says.

But Nader Nadery, from the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, says the contract marriage is not a way to legitimise sex but an attempt to find a practical solution to difficult circumstances like poverty.

“It is not a new trend to overcome a strict moral code,” Nadery says. “It started hundreds of years ago.”

In a normal marriage, an Afghan groom must pay a dowry that can be worth anything from 1,000 to several thousand dollars. He then has to pay for the wedding party, which can cost hundreds more.

“I waited for five years but no one came to our house to marry me,” says Nazira, whose first husband was killed by the Taliban. “My father was so poor that he couldn’t feed our family. One day a man came to our house and told my father that he wanted to marry me for seven months. My father had heard about contract marriages so he accepted,” she says.

Her husband Mohammad Asef, a 38-year-old shopkeeper, learned the custom in Iran, where he had gone to work for a year after his wife died, leaving him with two children. “When I returned to Afghanistan my aunt helped me find this woman,” he says, gesturing to Nazira, with whom he is halfway through a six-month contract.

Mohammad is her second contract husband. “Short marriages have a lot of benefits for women whose husbands have died,” she says, as her husband serves customers in the store.

“It helps them look after their children better and they don’t need to go out for sex. Also, we don’t have to pay for a wedding party because with a short marriage we just go to a mullah.”

She says a regular marriage would have cost them 3,000 dollars. “It is very difficult,” Nazira says. “Where would we find that much money?” AFP

Oddly enough, I first read about the concept in the ST:TMP novelization. Kirk apparently had a short term marriage to the woman who died in the transporter glitch. Didn't know the practice existed for real.

[Lord Zentei]

Oddly enough, I first read about the concept in the ST:TMP novelization. Kirk apparently had a short term marriage to the woman who died in the transporter glitch. Didn't know the practice existed for real.

It's because sex outside of marriage is a no-no - hence the invention of Temporary Marriage. After all, the troops on the march should not have to be tempted to break the Law.

[Netko]

As backwards as it seems in the more sane parts of the world, for them its at least a step foward...

[VT-16]

Hahah, I read about this being a common way to do legal prostitution in Iran. A quick visit to a local Mullah, be married and perform your "marital duties" and get a divorce some hours later. :P

[Spetulhu]

As backwards as it seems in the more sane parts of the world, for them its at least a step foward...

What's backwards about a limited-duration contractual marriage? I'd call it a step forward if it was available here.

[Jawawithagun]

Hahah, I read about this being a common way to do legal prostitution in Iran. A quick visit to a local Mullah, be married and perform your "marital duties" and get a divorce some hours later.

I heard this practise was also in use in the US during the prohibition era.

[BloodAngel]

What's the point of a 4-hour marriage...?

There's nothing in it.

[Darth Wong]

As backwards as it seems in the more sane parts of the world, for them its at least a step foward...

What's backwards about a limited-duration contractual marriage? I'd call it a step forward if it was available here.

I would prefer simply legalizing prostitution. But yes, when you think about it a convenient 4-hour contract marriage is actually more enlightened than the North American approach of throwing both the hooker and the john in prison. What a sad statement on our society that is.

[Admiral Johnason]

Just imagine what that kind of thing could do for divorce in the US.

We really need legal prostitution.

[Spice Runner]

What's the point of a 4-hour marriage...?

There's nothing in it.

The shorter ones like that seem to be obviously arranged for the purpose of sex. But there is also the dowry. The imporvished spouse can gain some additional wealth for a temporary obligation.

[General Brock]

Well, according to sexwork.com prostitution is legal, at least in Canada; soliciting is not. The law restricting living off the avails of prostitution should be tweaked so as to specifically cut out the pimps or at least restrict the amount they can collect as agents the same way agents for more conventional professional service providers are regulated.

The problem of more informal lowlifes seeking girlfriends/boyfriends to turn out for a quick beer buck would be harder to deal with, but the present situation seems to support that sort of activity.

According to straightdope.com the situation is similar elsewhere. Interesting that the scientific method was applied to impose laws with religious influences but not used to evaluate their effects.

Dear Cecil:

Why is prostitution illegal? --Frank Carroll, Arlington, Virginia

Dear Frank:

Because hookers are a nuisance, that's why. Always around when you don't want them, and never there when you do.

Prostitution isn't a felony. In most U.S. jurisdictions it's a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine and a short stretch in jail. In parts of Nevada, it isn't even that--prostitution is legal, though regulated.

Fine, you say. But why should prostitution be considered any kind of crime? The victims aren't complaining. Why should the rest of us care?

The usual explanation is that criminalization of prostitution is a product of the moralizing impulse in American politics. As with other victimless crimes such as gambling and drug use, our antiprostitution laws largely date from the Progressive era around the turn of the 20th century. This period also produced reforms such as the pure food and drugs laws and antitrust regulation.

Many Progressive leaders were educated, articulate members of the middle class that had emerged during the economic expansion following the Civil War. No longer was it necessary to accept social ills as inevitable, they felt. If we apply scientific methods and can-do attitude to our problems, we can eradicate them altogether.

In many respects the Progressive project was a great success. Today everybody is grateful that we have pure food laws and antitrust regulation. (Well, maybe Bill Gates isn't.) The legacy of the antiprostitution campaign is perhaps a little less positive.

In the 19th century prostitution, while not always legal, was tolerated in most of the world as a necessary evil. Enlightened opinion--enlightened male opinion, anyway--held that hey, boys will be boys, and men will be animals. The best we can do is regulate prostitution, including health inspections, licensing of brothels, etc.

But in English-speaking countries the regulatory impulse was countered by growing sentiment that prostitution was evil, period, and ought to be suppressed. Middle-class women played a leading role in the antiprostitution movement, arguing that prostitution threatened family life. Sympathetic journalists suggested that prostitutes were the principal carriers of venereal disease, then thought to be rampant. (Prior to the advent of effective treatment in the early 20th century, VD was certainly no trivial matter.)

The abolitionists ultimately carried the day. Before 1900 most legislation dealing with prostitution sought merely to control it. After World War I, usually considered the end of the Progressive era, the goal was to stamp it out.

Officially, that's been the aim ever since. But let's face it. Nobody really expects prostitution to go away, and it's hard to believe anyone ever did. They just don't want it in their back yards.

From time to time a few people make noises about changing U.S. prostitution laws. The best known is Margo St. James, whose hookers'-rights organization, COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), surfaced in 1973. She complained that prostitution laws gave the cops an excuse to harass women--prosecution of their male customers was far less frequent. St. James and her camp attracted their share of feminist allies, who felt that a woman's right to control her body included the right to rent it out. This line of thinking has succeeded to the point where much sociological and AIDS literature has replaced the pejorative prostitute with the more PC sex worker.

Other feminists, it should be said, consider prostitution a form of "female sexual slavery," to cite the title of one well-known book. One way or another women are coerced into prostitution, the argument goes--sometimes physically, often psychologically, and if nothing else out of economic necessity. But that seems to victimize prostitutes more than the reality warrants. Suffice it to say studies of prostitution have generally found that women who become prostitutes do so voluntarily, often to support a drug habit.

It's not clear to what extent the lot of prostitutes in the U.S. differs from that of their counterparts in countries that have a supposedly more enlightened attitude. Germany reportedly has taken the regulatory approach, in which prostitutes register with the police, obtain licenses to work in specified houses or areas, submit to VD checks, and so on.

Britain has followed a third course, somewhat confusingly known as abolition. What was abolished was not prostitution but prostitution laws, after a fashion. Prostitution as such is legal in the UK. What's not legal are various nuisances associated with prostitution such as soliciting on street corners, living off "immoral earnings," and keeping a brothel. In short, prostitution is legal in theory, illegal in practice. English prostitutes complain of police harassment just as American ones do, and receive similar punishments.

So: different legal theories, same result. That's the thing about prostitution, see. Whatever may be said for the rights of prostitutes in the abstract, streetwalkers don't do much for a neighborhood's property values. Sure, in these liberated times, we all have healthy attitudes about sex, right? But even among defenders of prostitutes' rights, the fundamental reaction to the business itself remains: ick.

--CECIL ADAMS

The idea that a person with a drug habit is competant to decide on a career of prostitution is kind of dubious; addiction is considered a serious disorder. Illegal drugs and drug addiction are the essential grease of the illegal economy. In any case, workers in any workplace are mandated to be sober and clean; so therefore should sex-workers.

Prostitutes as basic producers are being relgulatorily cheated to advantage some end-users and support a chain of unnecessary middlemen through an interesting combination of misregulation and deregulation. Sort of like farming.

Perhaps enough of those who use prostitutes aren't willing to see their chattle as human beings, and would prefer to keep them victimizable. The john looking for a disposeable fetish, the mafia boss looking to turn a profit, the middle-class moralist looking for people to look down on, all get something from the system the way it is. Many prostitutes may have psychological problems - sometimes from conditions imposed upon them - that find release through this dehumanization.

[General Brock]

It's because sex outside of marriage is a no-no - hence the invention of Temporary Marriage. After all, the troops on the march should not have to be tempted to break the Law.

Why not, they broke everything else, at least that was pagan. The article indicated it was acceptable to Mohammed, not that he devised it.

Since it seems to be Iranian, it could be a Zoroastrian holdover, or a custom more widespread in the ME prior to Islamization. If so, it would be interesting the compare the rationales, then and now. Probably the same, a mix of poverty, far ranging traders and migrant workers, and military postings.